The university designed the degree in response to requests by industrialists for graduates with the technical and management training to run a company.

[23] In 1899, the Königlich Technische Hochschule zu Berlin was the first polytechnic in Germany to award doctorates, as a standard degree for the graduates, in addition to diplomas, thanks to professor Alois Riedler and Adolf Slaby, chairman of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) and the Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies (VDE).

[citation needed] In 1916 the long-standing Königliche Bergakademie zu Berlin, the Prussian mining academy created by the geologist Carl Abraham Gerhard in 1770 at the behest of King Frederick the Great, was incorporated into the Königlich Technische Hochschule as the "Department of Mining".

During the 1930s, the redevelopment and expansion of the campus along the "East-West axis" were part of the Nazi plans of a Welthauptstadt Germania, including a new faculty of defense technology under General Karl Becker, built as a part of the greater academic town (Hochschulstadt) in the adjacent west-wise Grunewald forest.

The shell construction remained unfinished after the outbreak of World War II and after Becker's suicide in 1940, it is today covered by the large-scale Teufelsberg rubble hill.

[citation needed] The north section of the main building of the university was destroyed during a bombing raid in November 1943.

Planning for the re-opening of the school began on 2 June 1945, once the acting rectorship led by Gustav Ludwig Hertz and Max Volmer was appointed.

As both Hertz and Volmer remained in exile in the Soviet Union for some time to come, the college was not re-inaugurated until 9 April 1946, now bearing the name "Technische Universität Berlin".

The nonprofit public–private partnership (PPP) aimed to offer services provided by Technische Universität Berlin at the campus in El Gouna on the Red Sea.

[40] International student mobility is available through the ERASMUS programme or through the Top Industrial Managers for Europe (TIME) network.